In an electronic component mounter provided with a suction nozzle configured to pick up an electronic component, for example, an electronic component housed in a component housing section of carrier tape fed by a tape feeder is picked up by a suction nozzle using negative pressure and mounted at a specified position on a circuit board.
When the electronic component picked up by the suction nozzle is mounted on the circuit board, positive pressure air that acts as a vacuum break is supplied to the suction nozzle so as to return the pressure at the tip of the suction nozzle to atmospheric pressure, which releases the component from the suction nozzle. In this case, if the pressure of the air supplied to the suction nozzle is high, an electronic component just mounted on the circuit board or electronic components surrounding that position may be blown away, so the pressure of the air supplied to the suction nozzle is adjusted to be small.
Also, there are devices of this kind, such as disclosed in patent literature 1, provided with an air chamber of a specified volume for capturing air to be used for vacuum break in order to eliminate any differences in the state of the vacuum break due to the lengths of the piping paths between the suction nozzle and the positive and negative pressure switching electromagnetic valve, wherein air inside the air chamber is momentarily released when releasing the component from the suction nozzle.